Last month, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania John Fetterman checked into Walter Reed Medical
Center to be treated for severe depression, something he’s struggled with all of his life.
Senator Fetterman took this step on the advice of Dr. Brian Monahan, the attending physician
of the United States Congress. Last week, through his chief of staff, Fetterman shared an update on
his progress, indicating that he is recovering, will be back at work soon, and has been able to
conduct some limited senate business while at the hospital, including working on recently introduced
legislation to strengthen railroad safety regulations in response to the derailment of a
Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials near East Palestine, Ohio last month.
Fetterman has received a lot of support, and has been rightly commended for not only taking the
time to care for his mental health but for being open about his struggle with
depression and the need to seek professional help in treating it. Mental illnesses,
even ones as pervasive and potentially harmful as depression, are still stigmatized, misunderstood,
and wrongly viewed as evidence of personal failure or weakness — so it’s nice to see a
prominent person take his own bout with mental illness as an opportunity not to hide it,
but to draw attention to it, and to represent the fact that mental illness is a normal thing that
millions of people have to deal with every day, that it’s a difficult part of life,
but ought not be a shameful one. Good for you, Senator Fetterman.
But not everyone has responded so positively to Senator Fetterman checking himself into
Walter Reed to be treated for depression. Fox News host and guy who is now officially on the
record as wanting to stop people from telling the truth on his network if it hurts the stock price,
Tucker Carlson, had this to say about Senator Fetterman on the March 3rd edition of his show:
“Fetterman got to Washington in January and within a month suffered a mental breakdown
so severe that he wound up in the psych ward where he remains tonight. . . . Apparently,
Fetterman cracked under the strain of a Senate campaign in which he was forced to pretend that
the brain damage he had suffered from a stroke wasn't actually a big deal. . . . So the problem
with this is not John Fetterman himself. . . . The problem is that a society that elevates
people who are mentally ill is doomed. . . . Wouldn't a functional society elevate people
to positions of leadership who are the wisest, the smartest, the sanest, who have the greatest
degree of foresight and emotional self-control? Yes, it would. They would not intentionally
put people in positions of authority who were incompetent.” (Tucker Carlson, March 3, 2023)
That’s not all Carlson said. His attack on Fetterman went on too long for me to quote
it in its entirety, but if you fear I’m quoting him unfairly, I encourage you to seek out the
full segment. Elsewhere, in the bits I didn’t quote, Carlson also describes Fetterman’s wife,
Giselle, as a “former illegal alien,” and accuses Giselle and Fetterman’s chief of
staff Adam Jentleson of being “mercenaries” who are taking advantage of Fetterman’s illness.
So, Tucker Carlson is a shameless piece of shit, one of the most contemptible people on television,
and — I can’t stress this enough — a liar. But, his lies, his manipulations, his denigrations,
they have a distinctly familiar ring, don’t they? Look again at what he’s
saying about Fetterman, and by extension all people who suffer from mental illness:
He characterizes Fetterman’s depression as a breakdown, as cracking under the strain.
He calls him incompetent. He says that a society that elevates mentally ill people
to leadership positions is doomed. In another part of his diatribe,
Carlson questions Fetterman’s contributions to the aforementioned railroad safety bill,
wonders how a man receiving psychiatric care can possibly be able to write legislation.
The message Carlson is sending to his viewers is clear:
the mentally ill are weak, broken, incompetent,
must be kept from positions of leadership, and can’t be trusted to take part in our democracy.
There’s a term I like to use to refer to attitudes such as those expressed
by Tucker Carlson regarding mentally ill people:
Nazi shit. “A society that elevates mentally ill people is doomed” — that’s some Nazi shit.
And Tucker doesn’t reserve his Nazi shit for people with mental illnesses — at the end of
that segment about John Fetterman, he spreads it around to another marginalized group:
“This way of thinking is destructive for everyone. It's not empowering,
it's grotesque and if we continue, we might wind up with people dressed
in admiral's outfits pretending to be women. That could happen.”
Then, he cuts to a clip of Dr. Rachel Levine, describing herself as “the first
female Four-Star Officer of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.” Then,
back to Tucker, who says, “Now, that person is obviously mentally ill,
but so are the rest of us if we accept it as normal.”
Dr. Levine is trans. Tucker describes her as a mentally ill person pretending to be a woman.
Like I said, Tucker is a piece of shit. But, he’s not the only one. Whipping up
fear and hysteria regarding trans people has been one of the favorite pastimes of
right-wingers for the last several years. The day after Tucker’s segment on Fetterman aired,
Michael Knowles, a host at the Daily Wire, gave a speech at CPAC and said this:
“For the good of society . . . transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the
whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” (Michael Knowles, March 4, 2023)
Calling for the eradication of a group of people? Nazi shit.
Now, Knowles has insisted that what he said is not Nazi shit — he got kinda pissy with Rolling
Stone for a headline that said he called for the eradication of transgender people,
because, he insists, he didn’t call for the eradication of trans people — he
called for the eradication of transgenderism, as an ideology.
Oh! So, he’s not trying to get rid of transgender people,
just transgenderism — like how men’s rights activists don’t have a problem with women,
they have a problem with feminism. Totally reasonable for normal, non-bigoted men with
no psychological hang-ups whatsoever who are completely secure in their masculinity to
want to get rid of feminism, so yeah, Knowles is on solid footing, no question about it —
Except. “Transgenderism” isn’t really a thing. Trans people aren’t trans because of an ideology.
Trans people are trans because . . . they’re trans. I’m sorry to phrase it so obviously, but,
like, I’m a cis person because my gender identity aligns with the gender I was assigned at birth. I
don’t subscribe to cisgenderism, I don’t accept the cis ideology, I’m cis because that’s what I
am. Trans people are trans because their gender identities don’t match the ones they were assigned
at birth. That’s what makes them trans. No ideology necessary, no ideology involved.
So, when Michael Knowles says he wants to eradicate transgenderism from public life,
he’s saying he wants to eradicate trans people from public life, because there is
no such thing as “transgenderism” — what he’s referring to as “transgenderism” is
just the existence of trans people. That’s what he’s saying he wants to eradicate.
Nazi shit.
That CPAC speech wasn’t the first time Knowles has discussed his desire to get rid of trans
people. The week before on his Daily Wire show, he called “transgenderism” “a fraud,” said that
trans people are committing fraud by identifying as their gender, and said that “transgender
people is not a real ontological category. It's not a legitimate category of being.”
Describing an entire group of people as inherently deceitful and fraudulent,
and declaring that they do not constitute “a legitimate category
of being” — or phrased another way, that their existence is illegitimate.
Nazi shit.
But here’s the last point I want to make about Michael Knowles: even if we accept his terms,
and even if we take him at his word that he’s not talking about eradicating people,
and even if we pretend that “transgenderism” is a real ideology,
what he said at CPAC would still be Nazi shit, because attempting to eradicate trans people,
and knowledge about trans people, and awareness of trans people,
from public life is one of the first things the Nazis did when they came to power in Germany.
Magnus Hirschfeld, the German doctor who spent his career researching gender and sexual orientation
and advocating for the rights of LGBTQ people — in Germany — in the late 19th and early
20th centuries — was repeatedly assaulted by Nazis as the party rose to power throughout
the 1920s. Then, in May of 1933, two months after the Nazis took control of the Reichstag,
Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex Research in Berlin was raided and its library archives,
tens of thousands of books and journals containing decades of Hirschfeld’s work,
including research on gender identity and various forms of gender affirming
care and gender affirming surgery, were hauled out into the street and burned.
Eradicating transgenderism from public life — along with homosexuality, intersexuality,
and anything else that isn’t strictly in line with the cis-heteronormative gender
binary view of sexuality — is old school, literal, original Nazi shit.
And of course Michael Knowles gets pissy when you say he wants to eradicate trans
people. Just like Tucker Carlson gets pissy when you call him out on all the
Nazi shit he says about trans people, queer people in general, and mentally ill people,
and Black and brown people, and immigrants, and women, and teachers, and medical professionals,
and everyone else targeted by the hateful, ignorant lies he tells on a nightly basis for
millions of dollars. Just like Ron DeSantis gets pissy when you call out the bigoted, intolerant,
authoritarian legislation he’s imposing on the people of Florida for the Nazi shit that
it is. People who do Nazi shit always hate it when you call the shit they do Nazi shit,
because that makes it more difficult for them to get away with doing it!
That’s why they’re always throwing their little tantrums whining about cancel culture
and how everything’s too woke — they’re not mad about racial injustice, or economic injustice,
or the injustices people have to endure because of their gender, or their sexuality,
or their mental health, or their disability, or their religion, or what country they come from,
or what country their parents came from, or anything like that — they’re outraged
at the injustice that they can’t just do their Nazi shit and get away with it!
They want to be able to do their Nazi shit, and have the rest of us not even call it what
it is. According to them, trans kids can’t have gender affirming healthcare, pregnant
people can’t have abortions, school teachers can’t even acknowledge the existence of queer people,
much less offer support and validation to any queer students they might have — oh,
and school teachers can’t talk to students about slavery, or Jim Crow, or racism,
or the genocide of Native Americans, or anything else that might show the United States in an
unflattering light — and anyone who disagrees with any of that is met with relentless suspicion and
vilification and character assassination. But Tucker and Michael and Ron and the rest of the
gang over there on the right get to do Nazi shit and the rest of us aren’t allowed to say anything.
They still expect to get invited to Thanksgiving, for Christ’s sake! People who think like this,
act like this, watch Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis on Fox News — most of ‘em probably
don’t know who the fuck Michael Knowles is — they cheer for these bastards as they talk and
do their Nazi shit, and then when they get banned from Thanksgiving they piss and moan about that!
“What’s the world coming to? I can’t even see my grandkids! I’m a victim of the woke agenda!” No,
dumbass, you’re a victim of your family deciding they’re sick of putting up with your Nazi shit!
You want to be treated like a decent human being? Then you need to start acting like one! You don’t
get to do your Nazi shit! Sorry if that bums you out Tucker, Michael, Ron, and all you other
assholes on their side, but the rest of us aren’t just going to let you do your Nazi shit. You might
get away with some of it for a little while, but you’re not going to get away with it in the long
run, not because you’re going to be categorically legally barred from politics and public life like
Tucker wants to do to mentally ill people or Michael wants to do to trans people, but because
there are more of us than there are of you. You say you’re the silent majority, but you’re
definitely not silent, and you’re not the majority — if you were, you wouldn’t have to lie about how
many of you there were, and you wouldn’t have to rely on voter suppression to win elections — we
outnumber you, your grip on political power in this country, based on illusory mandates, is
slipping and eventually you’re gonna lose it, and you’re gonna fall into the same intellectual and
ideological landfill where we tossed all the Nazi shit the last time we had to go through this —
— But don’t worry! You’ve most likely still got a few years before that happens. And after it does,
you’ll be fine. Nobody’s calling for your eradication. Nobody’s saying your existence
is illegitimate. Absent your political power and cultural influence, you’re just
a bunch of assholes. And as human history has established pretty emphatically, “asshole” is
a real, and extremely crowded, category of being. So, you’ll have plenty of company.
And you’ll have something else you covet, too: you’ll get a break from the rest of us
constantly calling you out on your bigotry and your ignorance and your lies and your projection
and your fucking Nazi shit — because, when you’re not spewing your hateful,
dehumanizing rhetoric from massive media platforms, and you’re not using
the levers of government to impose your narrow, oppressive, brutal worldview on other people,
most of us don’t give a damn about you or what you think, because you’re fucking tiresome.
Stop trying to make your bullshit everybody else’s problem, mind your own business,
knock it off with the Nazi shit, and when Thanksgiving dinner rolls around keep your
fuckin’ mouth shut and eat your mashed potatoes, and we’ll all get along fine.